Hear This

My question is: Is there a compelling reason to support Open Sound System (OSS) from here on out? There are other areas we’d like to work on and if we can avoid having to invest resources maintaining the legacy OSS module, that’s one less item on our list of things to validate.

Some have suggested that we use one of the multimedia framework solutions available for Linux. Recommended candidates include GStreamer and xine. I know xine quite intimately and I seriously don’t believe that this approach makes sense. GStreamer might be more plausible, based on my reading of their literature. However, this approach seems to add more layers than is really necessary. I know I tend towards oversimplification, but audio programming is generally a matter of opening and configuring the audio interface and then either writing a buffer of samples (audio playback) or reading a buffer of samples (audio recording). That’s not especially complicated.